Secret Game - a Poem for Piano.


In recent years I hadn’t written a piece for the piano. I crossed the street when this instrument came my way. I felt its sound was too one-dimensional. I wanted colours, different colours, and layers that intertwine and mingle. The piano – this big, black boat – this instrument of my memories. As a child I’d sat in front of it, feeling great about the surface of the keys, feeling it and listening to sounds and noises. Later though I had the usual pianistic career, the teacher and the pencilled practice, the routines that would poison any relationship with the instrument.

When Sigrid Trummer asked me to write a piano piece, suddenly the desire came to get back to my first, childhood moments, to that intimate relationship with the Klavier. I wanted to speak through it with a muted voice, with my hand before my lips, as if I were trying to avoid getting caught writing for it. Caught doing what? Certainly not fishing in the stagnant pools of piano literature. No, I wanted to fish out a quiet, almost soundless piece from my past, gently vibrant, reminding me so much of what was said, and yet remaining so foreign - in other words, a secret game.

Thomas Heinisch

Translated by Stephen Ferguson